Inter-cropping with sugarcane has been found more beneficial to the farmers as it can boost total crop production on the land compared to other crops.
Systematic inter-cropping of potatoes, onions, lentil, mug beans, garlics and some other winter crops, vegetables and spices help increase production compared to sole-cropping. Quoting the field-level research findings and farmers views the sugarcane researchers and agriculturists revealed this while talking to this correspondent on Saturday.
Dr Khalilur Rahman, former Chief Scientific Officer of Bangladesh Sugarcane Research Institute (BSRI) at Ishwardi, said that inter-cropping not only increase total crop production but also help improve soil health and fertility with little or no negative effect on sugarcane yield and quality, reports BSS.
Terming the sugarcane as an industrial crop of Bangladesh, he said its farming is being gradually pushed into low-lying marginal lands due to high demand of cereals and vegetable crops. Besides, the national average yield is far below than potential yield.
He said that the existing sugarcane cultivation would not be economically viable without inter-cropping which always reduce the demand for extra land to produce the above crops as well as save foreign currency.
So, the method must be mandatory for the sugarcane farmers. Principal Scientific Officer Dr Samajit Pal said the BSRI has, so far, developed more than thirty production packages of different winter crops suitable as inter-crop with sugarcane but the technologies could not be expanded to the farmers' level due to lack of proper initiatives.
To overcome the problems, BSRI developed a series of high yielding varieties of sugarcane and production technologies especially inter-cropping packages for sustainable production under particular agro-ecological and socio-economic conditions for the poor farmers.
It involves intensive crop cultivation in terms of effective use of space and time. It plays an important role in promoting the development of agriculture in many countries of the world especially in densely populated developing countries with scare land reserves.
In many cases, it gives higher total production, monetary returns and greater resource use efficiently and increases land productivity by almost 60 percent. It often gives higher cash return and increases total production per unit area and time than mono-cropping.
Inter-cropping also increases nutritional quality of diet for the farm family allowing better control of weeds and increasing land equivalent ratio as much as 78 percent and reduces soil erosion. No adverse effect of inter-cropping vegetables on sugarcane yield was found even in some cases sugarcane yield was found higher than inter-cropped condition in single row but it was almost identical in paired row system.
Yields of inter-crops were higher in paired row. It was counted that large scale inter-cropping different vegetables with sugarcane in paired row could play a vital role in increasing national production of those crops without involving any extra land, Dr Pal added.
Latest News